When friends started texting me on Wednesday, each message felt like the same shock: a second death for Cesar Chavez. His first death came on April 23, 1993, at 66 — a passing that drew more than 50,000 people to his funeral in Delano, California, and led to a posthumous Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1994.
I learned about Chavez as a child in suburban Chicago. My parents worked blue-collar jobs — janitors and factory labor — so the idea of better pay and the right to organize wasn’t abstract. Chavez and the United Farm Workers movement symbolized what union power could mean for people like my family.
This week’s reckoning began with a New York Times investigation reporting that Chavez was accused by several women of sexual abuse and rape. NPR has not independently confirmed the allegations reported by the Times.
Before I edited for Morning Edition, I spent years at ProPublica covering sexual violence. That work wasn’t just about catching perpetrators; it was about listening. I spent long, patient stretches earning people’s trust and hearing how abuse had shaped their lives — in Alaska and Utah, in small towns and cities. The stories often matched a national pattern: perpetrators were people in positions of trust or authority — family members, bosses, clergy.
The Times piece named Ana Murguia and Debra Rojas and described accounts also linked to Dolores Huerta, the longtime labor leader and co-founder of the United Farm Workers. Huerta, now 95, released a statement this week saying, ‘I have kept this secret long enough. My silence ends here.’ Hearing familiar names alongside newer ones mattered: it showed how survivors, whether widely known or previously unheard, can choose to break silence on their own terms.
There is no uniform timeline for disclosure. Deciding to speak is deeply personal and often fraught. For many survivors, public recognition of harm is part of reclaiming their lives and preventing future abuse. For those of us who’ve reported these stories, one lesson repeats: people come forward because they want to protect others as much as to seek recognition for themselves.
So while friends and communities mourn a hero, this moment also brought new heroes into view. Ana Murguia and Debra Rojas — and Dolores Huerta for choosing to speak publicly — remind us that courage can arrive late and still be transformative. Their decisions to tell their stories underscore that it’s never too late to be heard, and that listening matters.